


In the Company of Impossibility

by miranda_wave (miranda_askher)



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Year That Never Was, meta-sorta, still pissed about Donna, why martha is the most badass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-20 00:22:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2408324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miranda_askher/pseuds/miranda_wave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Some people never do anything impossible. Improbable, perhaps. Unexpected. Shocking, even. Some people simply live and go on living, like anyone else on the street when you come down to it. Maybe a little smarter, a little stronger, a little braver. Their names are ordinary names like Sarah or Mickey or Jackie, Mel or Jo or Ian. Or Martha.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>On the Woman Who Walked the World.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Company of Impossibility

**Author's Note:**

> This has been stewing for a while. At the end of the world, who would you be?

At the end of the day, some people do impossible things.

Some become gods. Great goddesses of small things, roaring with the joy and the hurt of so much light until it shines golden like a sun, like a sun enormous and bright enough to hold all the galaxies in its thrall. Until hair and skin and eyes are nothing but fire, and time is nothing more or less than a nursery rhyme, the first one, and the last one. The goddess stops almost before she begins, she stops never, she stops only when hundreds of thousands are dead and millions more who might once have been killed were not, or will not be, or simply aren’t. She stops only when she has written her name across worlds that never were but will be, worlds that exist because she didn’t and exist solely to save her life.

The goddess’s name is Rose Tyler, a little girl in a red hood, a wolf who is in her, not in her, is only with her for a Moment. A girl who sunk her teeth into living, into laughing, in an ordinary flat and an ordinary job, long before she heard the whistle and hum of an old blue box.

Rose Tyler is just a girl who saved the world.

 

* * * * *

 

At the beginning of the day, some people do impossible things.

But let’s not talk about Clara. Clara the paradox, who suffered so, who never knew how much she will/did suffer, is suffering. Clara, whose choice was simple but made for her, by her long before the soufflés, the box in the clouds, the leaf on the wind. Clara the ontological paradox. She was/is/will be an impossible thing. She dreams of deaths and lives she never experienced, wakes knowing they are real, stares at her plain white bedroom ceiling and wonders fleetingly what it would be like to have an ordinary life, whether she ever had one. Sometimes Clara _is_ too impossible to _do_ impossible.

No, let’s talk about Amy, who has so many choices taken from her with her family, her lover, her daughter. Amy dies. Amy begins again. Amy climbs out of a box and meets herself, the roots of herself, a little girl with a slushie who will grow to believe so hard. Hard enough to die, to live, to remember something blue and the man who came inside it. 

Amy stands next to that box—not the magical blue one, the other box, the one between death and life—with her daughter who is not her daughter yet and her husband who is not her husband yet and counts down the seconds till her life might begin again.

And again, on a roof with angels descending. And again, at her own grave, knowing with striking clarity the answer, choosing to begin again, to live again, to live quietly unto death.

Amy Pond isn’t a girl who saved the world. But she saved herself, which is sometimes harder. 

 

* * * * *

 

Some people become impossible, or at least improbable, the glorious rush of it and then the loss, the knowing that you can’t keep it, that impossible things really are impossible and in the end, they burn up like stars.

A temp from Chiswick saved the universe. She exists in a thousand songs, ten thousand legends. Over time, spoken in millions of languages, her name trickles out. Syllables are lost, regained, reinvented, until perhaps she is simply called Time Lady, like another woman of songs, her identity lost to its meaning. Her hair goes ghostly pale on one world or night-black on another, her suits and dresses transform into armor or royal robes. She is the DoctorDonna, mythic. 

But we cannot speak about Donna Noble, because Donna Noble cannot speak for herself.

 

* * * * *

 

Some people never do anything impossible. Improbable, perhaps. Unexpected. Shocking, even. Some people simply live and go on living, like anyone else on the street when you come down to it. Maybe a little smarter, a little stronger, a little braver. Their names are ordinary names like Sarah or Mickey or Jackie, Mel or Jo or Ian. Or Martha.

Maybe when there aren’t those straightforward London streets any more, when there are half-finished buildings full of nightmares or suns burning up, or working long hours in distant pasts with the half-hearted hope of ever being free, maybe then ordinary becomes something more. Maybe bones become steel, voices become weapons, ordinariness becomes a beacon, because what can we believe in more than what we know, amplified?

(Maybe what we believe in most is what we can almost see in ourselves.)

Maybe ordinary becomes a quiet rebellion across a terminal world, a rebellion of stories and belief that grows louder, a background thrum vibrating beneath docility until it can’t be ignored.

Maybe ordinary becomes sweat slick over skin taut over muscle knit close over bone. Maybe that bone is steel. Maybe it only feels like it, held to the muscle, to the tendons, to the skin, lifting steel-toed boots another step, then another. Maybe it’s as strong running through a world of desolations as it is heavy creeping into another safe house, onto another old cot too battered to really hold its weight. 

Martha’s real weapon, then, is not the words, not the lie about the gun. Her real weapon is the sweat and the tears and the dirt and the steel-toed boots because that is what sustains her, dust and fear and plain grinding determination. At the end of the day, it’s not belief in a man she hasn’t seen in six months or ten or 363 days that drives her. It’s not the thought of her family imprisoned. It’s the things she wanted least of all, grime and desperation and the impossible crush of deaths committed or chosen in her name. 

This was always going to be her weapon. Martha dressed in black, dressed in a white coat, dressed in scrubs and the blood of a crash victim or a rape victim or a murder victim. Martha versus death. Martha, tired of victims and tired at night, walking home from the Tube with the face of that child she couldn’t save waiting behind her eyes, her head too heavy for her pillow. Steel in her skull. Martha, looking for survivors. Martha, fighting death.

Maybe the only thing that changes is that the Master and the Toclafane and the stooges and the Daleks give death a face, and circumstances choose her, offer her a pair of boots and a backpack and a lie, and later a weapon to end the world. Maybe Martha was always a soldier, always saw death lurking, always felt the words clawing at her lips. Maybe there was always a piece of her that could be a savior of worlds, or the destroyer of them. 

Maybe Martha dies. The woman who boards the Valiant the second time is no longer the one who left it the first time, will never be her again. Martha Jones saves the world. The price is Martha. The recompense is not her family alive, Earth whole, taking off the boots, a chance to go back to saving people in A&E. The recompense is time, and the choice to keep walking forward into her life. Going back has never been an option any more than the magical gun that could destroy evil, the _deus ex machina_. That’s Rose’s style, not hers. Martha Jones just does what she knows best: puts one foot (clean and sandaled today, booted and dusty and unbearably heavy tomorrow) in front of the other, one day at a time, heading toward something instead of away. 

Maybe in the company of goddesses and burning geniuses, paradoxes and people who have lived too many lives, the most impossible thing is an ordinary woman with a sturdy pair of shoes and a story without an ending.

**Author's Note:**

> This piece was inspired in part by the beautiful character studies and meta pieces by dirgewithoutmusic set in the Harry Potter and Narnia universes. Her stuff is way better than mine and you should go read it immediately.
> 
> Obligatory disclaimer thing: Unfortunately, me owning _Doctor Who_ is approximately as likely as me flying away in a blue box. Also I have no moneys, so don't sue me.


End file.
